Forty nine stu­dents posed as mys­tery shop­pers at five dif­fer­ent ex­changes that of­fer the NBC sav­ings plans to pro­duce data, which was then eval­u­ated by re­searchers.

The shop­pers took into ac­count wait­ing times for open­ing and re­deem­ing an ac­count and the over­all ef­fi­ciency of its cus­tomer ser­vice.Al Dawik de­cided to work on the project be­cause, she says, it gave her the chance to eval­u­ate the per­for­mance of one of the most valu­able busi­ness con­cepts in the UAE.

“I also got to see how the CEO of such a huge cor­po­ra­tion thinks and feels about the busi­ness and I learned to think big­ger in or­der to achieve a busi­ness mis­sion,” says Al Dawik.

Dr Yaprak Anadol, who su­per­vised the project, adds: “It is a great op­por­tu­nity to bring academia and the in­dus­try to­gether in or­der to re­main com­pet­i­tive in the mar­ket. This project is an ex­ten­sion of the prac­ti­cal teach­ing meth­ods fol­lowed in the Univer­sity of Dubai. With projects such as th­ese, our stu­dents are given a chance to ap­ply their knowl­edge to real life sit­u­a­tions, which will help them to be in­flu­en­tial and ef­fec­tive busi­ness lead­ers in the fu­ture.”